


In the Liminal Spaces

by silver_penny



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Gallifrey (Big Finish Audio)
Genre: Alien Psychology, Character Study, Coda, Episode Tag, Episode: s02e02 Spirit, Fluff, Gen, and thus it goes both ways, it isn't easy being President of Gallifrey you know, sort of a Leela character study through Romana's eyes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:14:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28247472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silver_penny/pseuds/silver_penny
Summary: After they return from Davidia, Romana can't sleep.Episode Coda for Chapter Six: Spirit
Relationships: Leela & Romana II
Comments: 1
Kudos: 7





	In the Liminal Spaces

**Author's Note:**

> Spirit is a strong contender for the best Big Finish audio I've ever heard. I thought it deserved a coda.

Romana had selected the largest and most comfortable armchair in the sunroom for her midnight stargazing – or at least for her attempt at midnight stargazing. Between the moderate atmospheric disturbance and the Citadel dome, she can only make out the most prominent stars, and they twinkle in and out in an inconstant and frankly disappointing array. Briefly she considers trying to recall the memory of being Leela, of being able to unquestioningly appreciate the natural world, but she has a feeling that, accustomed as she is to open skies and rural nights, Leela would hardly think it impressive either.

Still, the stars were the stars, and since arriving back on Gallifrey she’d found that the starscape often grounded her, reminded her of where she was and why she was doing what she was doing. A hold-out from her time with the Doctor, she thought, a reminder of the hours she had spent idling in the TARDIS console room and criticizing his patchwork electronics job while the doors were flung wide open and they passed by comets, galaxies, planets and nebulae. And so Romana is here – under a double pane of monitored glass and a class-R forcefield, a robust city dome and the Gallifreyan atmosphere, cradling a mug of illicit tea in her hands and staring at the stars, unable to sleep.

There, at the top left, the Staff of Rassilon – she has _that_ in a closet somewhere nearby – and there, the twelfth vampire, down the southwest to the Chronodiegetic Crab, scuttling along the sands of time until you reach S26, then spin around to find the leg of Zagreus – ha! – and across again to the whatsit-of-Rassilon and down to –

“Romana.”

Romana nearly tips her drink over from the shock of it, but Romana is the President of Gallifrey and Presidents of Gallifrey do not spill their drinks.

“Leela,” she breathes, twisting around in her armchair and resting her hand over her sternum, feeling her hearts pound underneath. “Don’t sneak up on a person like that. I nearly jumped out of my skin.”

“Perhaps _you_ should remain more aware of your surroundings.”

“Oh, don’t be silly, Leela. It’s the middle of the night in my private quarters. Who would disturb me?” She doesn’t need to look at Leela to see the arch of her eyebrow, and around the corner of her vision she sees Leela pass behind her to settle on the other end of the couch. She looks critically up at the double-paned ceiling and Romana remembers with a flush of embarrassment her own prediction of Leela’s disinterest. She clears her throat.

“And, uh – why have you decided to disturb me, Leela?”

“I wasn’t aware my presence was a disturbance, Lord President.” Leela sounds wide awake for the middle of the night, and she is gazing steadfastly upwards at the pitiful stars. Unfortunately, this is one window she cannot break.

“Oh, Leela, it’s not.” Goodness, Romana! After everything? “I didn’t mean it like that, really I didn’t. You know that, surely.” Some days she’s stunned she’d ever made it to the Presidency – but she suspects talking to Leela is, in fact, harder than the endless speeches she’d rattled off in the Panopticon.

Leela hums, noncommittal, and flicks her eyes down from the stars and across the couch. Romana groans. “Really, though, why are you here? It’s the middle of the night, and it’s been a long day.”

“I could ask you the same question, Romana,” Leela says. “Why are you still awake?”

“Oh, well. I couldn’t sleep, I suppose. You know how it is.” Romana looks back up to the stars, wondering if Leela knows the Gallifreyan constellations or if she spends her time searching fruitlessly for her own. Does she even know where Leela is from, what kind of starscape she’d grown up under?

“Yes,” Leela says softly.

She was from Earth, surely? But Romana has never heard her mention those places on Earth of which the Doctor had been so fond. The silence stretches out between them, tempered by the late hour. Romana watches the stars; she can see Leela watching her. Romana sips at her tea.

“I suppose it’s just…” she stops, but the silence is weighted now with expectation. “It’s just that being back here – back in the Capitol, I mean – it makes the whole of what we experienced today more real. On Davidia, it was an interruption, but here it’s…my job, I suppose. A present threat rather than…oh, I’m not making any sense. Holdover from our, ah, _jumbling_ earlier, I suppose you could say.”

On her right, she sees Leela shake her head. “It makes sense to me, Romana,” she says. “On Davidia, the Broken Man was a puzzle and a concern. Tomorrow, on Gallifrey, he will become a part of your _scheming_ and your _politics_. You will have to confront Darkel, and Wynter, and Narvin, in order to solve this puzzle. And if you don’t go to sleep –” Romana can hear the pitch of her voice rise in that way with which Leela likes to tease her people. “– then you don’t have to wake up tomorrow.”

She’s right, of course. Leela is right more often than she knows.

“Time passes the same whether or not I sleep, Leela,” Romana chides. “I am a Time Lord, after all. I think I’d know.” She has gone back to studying Leela on the other end of the couch, and so she catches the spark in her eyes when she says it. Even before Leela opens her mouth, Romana knows she’s walked into a trap.

“Well, then, how about you get some rest, Romana? Tomorrow will not be any easier than today.”

Baited, tracked across the conversational field, and trapped. Worthy of a hunter.

She would have protested, on principle, but Leela has stood and come around in front of her, has taken the lukewarm mug from her hands and deposited it on the sunroom table, where it is sure to leave a ring in the morning. Regardless, she lets Leela grasp her by the hands and pull her up, and she trails behind her up through the Presidential Suites and into her picture-perfect bedroom.

Leela passes through the doorway and she balks.

“Leela, I can take care of myself, you know.”

“Hush,” Leela says, not unkindly, and nods towards the four-poster in the middle of the room. “I know you Time Lords do not sleep much, but you _do_ need sleep and you will have many challenges ahead of you tomorrow.”

“I didn’t realize appointing you my bodyguard would mean I’d have to follow your orders, Leela.” But she climbs up into her bed anyway, flicking up the covers and reluctantly embracing the sensation of twice-worked Monan silk between her fingertips. She curls up and lets her eyes close.

“If it has to do with your safety, _President_ Romana, then it is my responsibility,” Leela says gravely.

Romana hums. “I think Wynter would fight you on that one,” she says.

Leela laughs. “I rather think he would _not_.”

It is, all things considered, a ridiculous image – an unfair fight if ever she’d seen one. Romana is preparing to dismiss Leela, her duties hopefully carried out to her satisfaction, when she feels the mattress shift beneath her. Startled, she pushes herself upwards to a sitting position only to see Leela clambering up to sit on the other side of the bed.

“Leela!” she gasps. “What _are_ you doing?”

“I will take watch, Romana,” Leela says calmly. “Go to sleep.”

Romana is now wide awake. “This is – this is hardly appropriate. And there’s no danger, no need to keep watch.”

“Then why are you still awake?” Leela flashes her a sly, quicksilver grin. “Besides, Romana,” she adds. “you’re not the first Time Lord I’ve had in my bed.”

Were it not for her respiratory bypass system, Romana thought it very likely she would have choked on her own trachea. As it is, she takes a moment to gather her thoughts back before issuing a correction. “Actually, Leela, I think you’ll find that this is my bed, not yours.”

Leela nods in assent and leans back against the headboard, shuffling her feet and her hips in an effort to get comfortable. Turning over Leela’s words in her mind, Romana wonders how she can joke so lightly of Andred. She had known little of him, before his death had caused her friend such pain and Narvin such frustration; but Leela’s steadfast love and appreciation, always orbiting but never eclipsing her own sense of self, is more foreign to her than Leela herself. The love Leela carries with her is so far from the adulatory regard of her House, from the desperate, hopeful relationship she remembers observing between Merak and Princess Astra all those years ago. Unbidden, she recalls the depths of emotion she had suffered in the sensory deprivation tank, and her conscious mind shies away from the memory. She cannot understand the root of Leela’s own private grief, her estrangement from the regenerative process and Andred’s second self, and thus she is frustrated in her own attempts to convince her to stay.

Twenty-five years is only a fraction of a fraction of the Time Lord lifespan, and yet Leela is already prepared to move on. Many years ago, at the Academy, Romana had taken a class in comparative alien psychologies, and they had spent several weeks discussing relative time scales as they related to psychological development. If the Jordan-Hyperschlauss Scale is correct, then Leela’s fifty or so years of experience would make her psychologically equivalent to a Time Lord on her seventh regeneration, with all the wisdom of an elder Cousin and the regard such an individual would be owed. Among the long, creeping Time Lord lifespans, Romana wonders if Leela feels like a child. But as she shifts slowly back down, settling underneath the covers, the image warps and inverts. With her wisdom and experience, among Romana’s impatience and Narvin’s petulance and Braxiatel’s flippancy, does Leela see them as children instead? Convinced of their own importance, striding through the Capitol hallways, grandstanding in the Panopticon…

Again, she recalls the depth of emotion she had glimpsed, but failed to understand, that morning on Davidia.

Romana tilts her head to the side to where Leela has settled against the headboard. Despite the late hour, she is awake and clear-headed. Her knife blade rests well-balanced on her knee.

“Go to sleep, Romana,” she says, with the hunter’s ability to know when she is being observed. “Tonight, I will keep watch.”


End file.
